Healing Your Gut Biome and Reversing Chronic Disease with Josh Dech

Ruth Soukup: If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you already know I’m obsessed with gut health, but I promise you have never heard it explained like this before. And today’s post is going to not only stretch your brain, but get you fired up because we are getting pretty nerdy over here. My guest is Josh Dech, a former paramedic turned gut health detective.

And everything he has to share is not only incredibly interesting, but also So practical and so relevant to every single one of us. And I truly can’t even not wait for you to dig in.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ruth Soukup and I’m the founder of Thinlicious and the creator of the Thin Adapted System, as well as the New York Times bestselling author of seven books. And today we are going to be chatting with Josh Dech, host of the ReversABLE podcast and founder of the Gut Health System Solution.

He’s a holistic nutritionist and a leading consultant for physicians across North America in the field of gut health. It’s an interview that goes deep, I’m telling you right now, and it covers a lot. So without further ado, I am so excited to be able to introduce you to today’s interview guest, Josh Dech.

Josh, thank you so much for being here today. I’m so excited to talk to you about all the things. 

Josh Dech: Ruth, it’s a pleasure to be here. All the things is such an umbrella, and I’m so excited to just open it up and see where it lands. 

Ruth Soukup: Let’s open it up. I love it. Why don’t we just start by hearing who you are, what you do, how you got to be doing what you’re doing now.

Josh Dech: I’ll make a long story short. I used to be a paramedic and it was sick care, not health care. We picked the same people up, the same things over and over for the same diseases until they died and they got more medication while they were still living. for the same diseases that nobody ever actually fixed.

They just managed. And so I left that, got into personal training, woman that came to see me really early in my career. She was actually 59 years old at the time. Her name was Lynn and she was on 17 pills and insulin for breakfast, nine pills and insulin for dinner. And this is not uncommon for the standard American over 50, 60 years old.

And she was on disability at work, high blood pressure. She slept with a CPAP machine. You know, she was overweight dealing with all these issues. She Within two years time, Ruth, two years is all it took of just diet, health and lifestyle and exercise. She was off all but two medications. And here she is now.

So she started with me at age 57, rather, and here she was now at age 59 and she broke a world record as a weightlifter in the Canadian rock. 

Ruth Soukup: That’s amazing. Wow. 

Josh Dech: Super amazing. 

Ruth Soukup: What a testament. I mean, 

Josh Dech: capacity, the human body. 

Ruth Soukup: We could go out just off on that tangent for the whole time, because I’m telling you, it is crazy to me that the modern medicine that we have, where it’s pills, let’s just give you more pills and give you more pills and put a, it’s like sticking a bandaid on it.

Right? And it’s not healing you. It’s not fixing it. And yet there’s so many, such an easy solution. There’s a way to fix this without the drugs. So let’s talk about, oh, you’re going to get, you’re going to get me going today. 

Josh Dech: I’m going to get you riled up. That’s the short of it.

Moved on to nutrition. 

Ruth Soukup: Yes, 

Josh Dech: for sure. Okay. Here we are specializing in gut. That’s all. That’s the long of it. 

Ruth Soukup: Let’s talk about gut health. Let’s start there because North America is basically the capital of gut disease for the world. And why is that? 

Josh Dech: It’s really interesting to look at statistically.

And so, you know, I actually now have the pleasure of working as a physician’s consultant and a medical lecturer. And of course, all these things that we do, and this is the information that even they being on the inside of this aren’t privy to until someone shares it with them. North America is a gut disease capital of the world, because depending on the stats that we look at, whether it’s a small study of 2000 or a large one of 70, 000.

Estimates are roughly 70 percent of Americans experience some kind of gut issue at least once a week. Now that’s gas, bloat, pain, cramping, constipation, diarrhea, like whatever low grade issues that could be construed as IBS or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. That’s the low grade. But here’s what we have to consider.

And this is sort of where we’re breaking the mold in gut health and gut disease. I now specialize in Crohn’s colitis and what I’ve done is separated this because Western medicine for decades now has said Irritable Bowel Syndrome, so IBS and IBD or Crohn’s colitis are different, but even in their studies and research papers, it’s a Venn diagram where they overlap, they kind of actually look the same, it’s just more severe.

So we said, what if this bloat, pain, cramping, constipation that 70 percent of Americans have once a week is like a wear and tear, where if you’re wearing a pair of shoes without socks? And that heel starts to rub, it gets red, in blisters, in bleeds, and it’ll wear down to the bone eventually if you let it.

And that’s sort of this progression. Now some people progress very quickly, some don’t. But either way, we see this progression of disease. Now, 70 percent experience this low grade issue, but consider this. There’s roughly 7 million, give or take, upwards of 8 million cases. of inflammatory bowel disease worldwide, Crohn’s colitis.

The United States of America is 5%, or North America is 5 percent of the global population, but they have more than 50 percent of the global cases of inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s colitis. So we have 70 percent who are starting now. We’re getting more and more severe, and 5 percent of the globe, which is North America, has 50 percent of the worst case scenario.

So we are, bar none, the gut disease capital of the world. And this is a challenge, where the medical system goes these diseases are idiopathic, meaning unknown cause. They’re just genetic. That’s a statistical impossibility. And if 1990, there was about 3 million global cases. Today, it’s 7 to 8 million.

Half of them being in the U. S. So that can’t possibly be genetic. You can’t grow in two, three times of cases. It doesn’t happen, right? So the data that these doctors are given is completely wrong. So they’re stuck in this ideology of these diseases are genetic. There’s nothing we can do. So medicate and manage and we treat disease like it’s innate to our biology.

And it’s so backwards. Everything. Is a cause enough, and I go off on a tangent here, but I’ll stop myself there. 

Ruth Soukup: You can go off on that tangent. So, so let’s back up a little bit because gut health is so intrinsic to overall health, right? And. So explain that a little bit more. Like why is it so, so, so essential?

Josh Dech: That is such a great question. So it’s really interesting. Like our guts integrate with everything. I argue much of the time they are as important as our DNA. They even integrate with an influence or genetic expression. And so we look at what our gut and gut bacteria do. There used to be an estimate that it’s 10 to one that we are born 99% human cells, 1 percent microbes, and by the time we die, we’re 10 percent human and 90 percent microbes.

So we’re actually more microbes than humans being fungi and yeast and bacteria and parasites. Estimates have varied. Some people say it’s, you know, one to three or whatever, it doesn’t matter. But long and short, there’s trillions of them, 50 to 100 trillion of these microbes. They do all kinds of things for us.

They ferment food. They help detoxify and digest and create all kinds of vitamins. They balance out hormones. They do all kinds of things for us that are integral to our health and being and even our genetic and DNA expression. And so these gut microbiomes have a very structured way of coming about from birth to life to death.

And there’s so much in our Western world that interrupts this perfect. And that’s whether it’s being born c section, which is happening more and more used to be, you know, 5 percent now it’s almost 30 percent whether it’s the antibiotics early on, whether it’s being bottle fed versus breastfed, there are so many things that really interrupt this process.

Into this growth and development of our microbiomes and we hear microbiome and go what does that even mean micro and biome micro is small biome is ecosystem And so it’s this ecosystem and community of microbes we have living in our digestive system And they actually change every 12 to 24 inches We actually have a different community that all get along and they Integrate with different organs along the way to digest our food and they do all kinds of amazing things You For us, but these diseases that we have, these gut diseases that are developing, which makes us the gut disease capital of the world is because we’ve had this agreement that I help you, I will create an environment for you with food and nutrients where you can grow and flourish and thrive inside my body.

And in return, you produce vitamins and help me detoxify and do all these checks and balances. You create, you know, 70 to 80 percent of my immune cells are grown in my gut. You do this for me. I do this for you. In the last a hundred years or so, we completely broken that agreement. And so now. Our guts are sort of fighting with our body through no longer living in cohabitation and we’re riddled with disease because of it.

Ruth Soukup: Yes So what would be like the ideal scenario? Let’s say in a perfect world where you have a perfect Healthy gut like how are you born? What did you eat? What do you eat all through your life? What does that look like? And then how does that compare to what we’re doing right now? 

Josh Dech: Oh, that’s such a great question.

We 

Ruth Soukup: know how it would compare, but 

Josh Dech: I think you have an idea. I’m going to go. What would be the 

Ruth Soukup: ideal scenario? Cause I’m even thinking gosh, if I was going to have a child now, I’m already thinking first of all, I’m a mom who has teenagers. So now I’ve already screwed my kids up. So it’s too late for them, but maybe my grandkids will be good.

Josh Dech: How do we help them? How 

Ruth Soukup: do we help them? Give me the starting point. How do I do it right next time? 

Josh Dech: All right. I got you covered. All right. So there are four main ways that an infant will become exposed to or colonized by bacteria. So the first is going to be in utero, that’s development. The second is at or during birth.

The third is during the early days of breastfeeding. The fourth will be the food environment around them as they grow and develop. And so we used to believe that the placenta was totally sterile, but that’s long since been debunked. And more interestingly, we also thought the fetal gut or the digestive system of a growing fetus was actually sterile.

But they’ve actually studied fecal meconium. Meconium is fecal stool basically or fetal stool and they realize that there’s bacteria actually present in the gut prior to birth And so there’s been some interesting research on colonization It’s kind of spotty, but we also know the mother’s gut microbiome.

So that community of gut bacteria actually changes Between the first and the third trimester, more so during the second and the third. But there’s certain gut bacteria that start to increase in mom as she’s growing this baby, which happen to be the first ones that colonize the infant microbiome. So as a baby is breastfeeding and growing and developing, they get bifidobacterium, your lactobacillus, the ones you typically see on the shelf at a drugstore and a probiotic.

These actually grow in increased amounts in mom. But here’s what’s really interesting. There’s, these bacterium are associated with increased immune system, enhanced inflammatory responses, and they’re also thought in these higher levels to increase permeability and what we call bacterial translocation, which means moving these things from place to place.

Now, we might think Increased immune inflammatory responses and gut permeability is bad. But here’s what’s really interesting. They did a study where the intestinal microbiota from pregnant women were actually given to germ free mice. They sterilized their intestines as best they could, took feces from these pregnant human women, and gave them to the mice.

And researchers found that these mice Actually had changes to their body that were associated with pregnancy. So weight gain, insulin resistance, elevated immune responses. So these are the signals. It is super interesting. These are the signals the immune system actually gets the body gets from your microbiome.

So this can actually explain why the Western world sometimes treats pregnancy more like a disease or a condition because they have these low grade systemic inflammatory markers observed in the blood of healthy pregnant women. The mother. In the fetus share of blood supply, as well as cells through something called microchimerism, which is where they actually transfer cells of each other back and forth, which is part of the bonding process.

But a large part of the metabolites, we call these byproducts, in the blood are actually from mom’s blood. Microbiome which are shared with her baby and so a lot of these leaky guts of these inflammatory and immune responses can actually help Transfer these microbes in utero from mom to baby before it’s even born.

And so that’s the first stage that’s one of four Yeah. So 

Ruth Soukup: then what? So then you move on to. 

Josh Dech: So now we move on. Now we have birth. And this is really interesting because when a baby is born, actually coming through the birth canal through the vaginal canal, we know that there’s another colonization of microbes coming through this birth canal on the skin and even gets into the mouth and the gut.

And it’s really important if you look at it. It’s very important to come through the birth canal. Look at what happens when you take a hatching chick and you break the egg for it, it can actually die from failure to thrive because it doesn’t build that strength and those hormones and the stimuli from, you know, pecking away and breaking its own shell, it fails to thrive in the outside world.

There is an association with babies born C section versus Vaginal birth were very different. C section babies. This is a 2020 study in the environmental research and public health that showed C section babies developed respiratory and neurological disorders like autism, schizophrenia or immune related diseases, asthma, skin issues, celiac, juvenile arthritis, diabetes, type 1 diabetes or obesity from being born C section because they lack type All these vital immune bacteria, plus that failure to thrive, because he even tested the umbilical cords of babies born C section versus vaginal, and they found the vaginal birth babies had higher levels of cortisol from the struggle coming through the birth canal, which increased their ability to thrive.

Yeah. As they develop. 

Ruth Soukup: Wow. 

Josh Dech: It’s really. They 

Ruth Soukup: don’t talk about that. 

Josh Dech: They don’t talk about that. And we’re seeing C sections increasing and bottle feeding being pushed more. Yeah. But this gets really scary because we know that breastfeeding is well known to be associated with better short and long term health outcomes for babies as they develop to adults.

We know that infants not being breastfed. Has a strong association with increased infectious morbidity so infections that create disease as well as things like Childhood obesity again type 1 and 2 diabetes even leukemia And there was a meta analysis of 19 different studies that they had done which concluded babies who were born Bottle fed versus breastfed were twice as likely to die from sudden infant death syndrome known as SIDS.

And so Excuse me. Yeah And so there are some moms who cannot breastfeed and that’s okay We have to do what we have to do But if you have the choice clearly going as close to nature intended Is the better way to go about this 

Ruth Soukup: in all things, 

Josh Dech: all things, always

develop bacteria. There is a fourth, if you’d like to dive into that one. So the fourth way, this is after. So we’ve now you’ve gestated, the baby is born and the baby has been breastfeeding. And this is where we start to develop through like our food and our environment through interactions with the outside world.

So consider that best case scenario. Is growing up with the best possible microbes and the best health outcomes you are born on a farm through the birth canal, you’re living and growing up on organic pesticide and glyphosate free farms, you’re interacting with nature, you’re, you know, playing with animals and digging in the dirt, you’re getting sunshine exposed to the elements, you’re not engaging in these standard Western American lifestyles.

That’s a best case scenario on the far end of that spectrum, worst case picture, a C section birth. Who’s never breastfed and they’re bottle fed strictly. Instead, they live in a high rise in New York city and just insult injuries. Say they are in the height of the pandemic and everyone’s mass and everything’s sterilized, everyone’s inside.

You live by yourself or you’re homeschooled with no pets. That’s like the least exposure. So you have farm raised natural versus city raised sterilized. And these are two very different paths to development. And so knowing what we know about how we grow and develop through exposure, we can see how these is sort of open the window to any and all disease.

And we’ve seen this in studies, looking at communities from say world Nigeria versus urbanized Western societies. We can see massive differences in our ability to break down fiber and all kinds of stuff. In Western societies, we lose a lot of those microbes. And so what we’re doing, everything we’re doing, really, we don’t live.

It’s no longer compatible with our biology. It’s so wrong. 

Ruth Soukup: Interesting. Okay. So we understand the ideal situation now, like what we all wish we would have had. And gosh, makes me want to be Amish. 

Josh Dech: I’m trying to buy a farm right now. 

Ruth Soukup: But what happens then now we’re adults, right? We can’t go backwards. We can’t do it over again.

How do we fix it? 

Josh Dech: Next to going back in and breastfeeding, we can look to do as many things as we can to continue inoculating ourselves. So avoid hyper sterilization, get outside, engage with things, touch people, get in the sun, get in nature, have pets, go visit a farm a couple times a year. If you have friends go help with the yard work on the weekends.

These are just great ways to generally expose. We have to consider we’re also doing things that are destroying our guts. And now You know, we’re able to reverse some of the worst digestive diseases like Crohn’s and Colitis, which is supposed to be unfixable because we’re addressing some of these things, which are really quite basic in addition to, because here’s the problem.

So many of us have been exposed to all these things. We destroyed our microbiomes in our guts. We’ve destroyed all this ecosystem that’s supposed to be working in conjunction with us. But then we take it a step further. And now we have A body that can no longer properly defend itself. What happens, we now have invaders.

We have overgrowth of opportunistic microbes that shouldn’t be there. We have an overdevelopment of parasites where they enter and they’re no longer fought off, and they start to grow and develop these diseases. And so you have people forever managing symptoms. So what can we do? We can, if you want to drain the bathtub, turn the water off, right?

That’s the first things first. And so we have to stop doing the things contributing to the disease, whether that’s. Eating organic as often as you can or like I don’t buy organic because the label is three times expensive and it’s stupid But what I’ll do is I’ll go to the farmer’s market. I say hey, what do you guys use on your produce?

I buy from a farm. They come out of BC. It’s picked one day and then brought in the next so it’s a day old It’s not, you know, three weeks on the shelf. They use one fungicide spray at the beginning of the year and that’s it But that excludes them from being organic, but in the U. S. A. There’s 18 to 20, 000 different pesticides approved for use.

There’s billion plus pounds spread on our food every year. It’s no wonder our guts are such in such disarray. And so if we can simply change you. Mhm. A handful of meals a week, or if you eat fruit, go to the environmental working group, EWG. org, check the clean 15 of the dirty dozen list. The dirty dozen are the 12 foods I will never, ever eat inorganic, because they are so filthy ridden with pesticides, and you can tell the difference.

They hurt. If you avoid them for long enough, And you eat them, they do hurt your gut. You can feel it. You feel brain dead. You feel sluggish. You feel like this pain. And even some clients start to develop blood and mucus in their stool if things get severe enough. So those are really basic ways that we can just start to safeguard and begin regrowing.

Ruth Soukup: So, so stop putting the bad stuff in, which means eating the right stuff. I want to talk more about the Crohn’s and colitis because I’m fascinated. I have friends with both Crohn’s and colitis, so I’m very familiar with just how devastating both those conditions can be. But quick question that I want to ask first before I forget is about the effects of the pandemic and what you were saying about.

This whole generation. I mean, we’ve talked like, you know, I mean, we don’t talk about it on this blog very much, but I’ve often thought like thinking back to the pandemic and how difficult it was to like homeschool my kids. When I’m a work from home, mom, my husband is home full time. We’ve got four computers in our house and you know, all the high speed internet, like we had access to everything and it was still hard.

And I’ve thought man, what a class division for the families that didn’t have access to all the. Things that we had and how much, how like the impact of that is going to be generational. But what you’re saying is the impact of that is going to be generational from just a health perspective from people, social distancing and not getting like the whole, there’s a whole generation of.

Kids who are born during those few years that didn’t get outside that didn’t get around people that like, what do you think, what do you think is going to, what we’re going to see from that in the future? 

Josh Dech: I think we are in for a really rough ride down the road. We know that early onset that early development of health really sets the stage.

It’s like building a foundation. You build your house on sand versus stone. One’s going to collapse eventually. And so you can constantly try to reinforce, but sometimes it is a constant uphill battle. Now the good news is The microbiome doesn’t really set like a thumbprint, so to speak, till three, four years old, depends on who you ask.

So there is sometimes still room for this development and growth early on. And it continues to grow. Think of it like throwing seeds into a meadow before it turns into a rainforest. It’s easier to inoculate this meadow that it is a full grown established rainforest, right? And so this is what we start to see.

But This is some interesting work from Dr. Sabine Hazan. She’s notorious for this stuff, speaking out about what’s happened with the virus and the jabs and all these things, and how they’ve completely wreaked havoc on things like bifidobacterium, which we need for our immune systems. We need them for short chain fatty acids and anti inflammatory.

They have so many benefits, but these have ripped them apart and decimated 90 to 100 percent in some cases of people’s guts. It’s almost sterilized vital bacteria. And so it’s horrific. And we’re seeing so much disease and these bacteria, they’re not just there to make vitamins and clean us out.

There’s actual signaling molecules they produce that help your immune system keep checks and balances, hormones, and all kinds of things that they do back and forth. They signal, they create neurotransmitters. Like every disease under the sun, every condition, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, mental health, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, these are all connected to the gut, as is acne, and arthritis, and psoriasis, and anything you can name can be traced back to the gut.

In fact, 14 out of 15 of the leading causes of death as per CDC, that’s 93 percent are chronic inflammatory conditions that we connect right back to the gut. So, right? 93 percent of the deaths. Could be avoided. 

Ruth Soukup: Like it couldn’t be a more important topic. And if you’re worried about your health at all, this, you have to be focused on this.

Like you just can’t, you cannot ignore it because it is so critical to every piece. And, you know, we talk a lot about Hormones and insulin resistance and all of those things, but it’s all connected to, to gut health as well. Like your whole, your body does not work in a vacuum, right? There’s no one part of it that works in a vacuum.

And so if you’re not, Oh, okay. So let’s talk about, I want to make sure we have enough time for Crohn’s and colitis because. Doctors basically say these are incurable, right? Forever diseases, you can maybe manage your symptoms, but you can’t fix it. Why do you say that it can be fixed? 

Josh Dech: If you look at it from the ideology of disease being innate to our biology, it’s unfixable.

It’s just, this is part of you now. And your Crohn’s is a Budesonide or a Stelara or Humira deficiency, which makes no sense. Think about it this way. This is the simplest way I can explain it here, Ruth. Everything in your body has a cause and effect reaction. Me bending and straightening my arm is the cause of my bicep contracting and my tricep relaxing.

My muscles contracting and relaxing is a byproduct of sodium and potassium or calcium magnesium moving in and out of these pumps on a cellular molecular level. Everything is cause and effect. Your body has dozens literally hundreds of checks and balances inside of it to keep your immune system from randomly attacking yourself And if something does or becomes cancerous, there’s half a dozen cells that get right there and boom kill it right away So it’s not this you can’t just wake up one day suddenly allergic to yourself out of the blue inflammation Always has a root cause even something as complex as Crohn’s colitis But we’re not even looking for the root cause if you get pink eye You should have washed your hand after touching your butt.

If you got a burn you touch something hot It’s cause and effect inflammation and the gut is no different and the ideology that you can go from healthy to sick practically overnight It’d just be your body suddenly being allergic to you is absolutely asinine and it flies in the face of everything we know about healthcare.

It’s like saying gravity doesn’t exist. It is such a true solid to our very existence. This is an illogical fallacy and we’re proving it left, right, and center. I was literally just on TV. There’s a TV show called Know the Cause a couple months back in February this year out in Dallas, Texas, because a gentleman that we had who had Crohn’s, who had ulcerative colitis rather for 17 years, poof, gone, took a six months, pulled it out of his system, completely reversed.

He’s eating healthy. He’s traveling, no medications, no drugs. His family years back was, they prepared for his death on his deathbed many times. He was on the brink. All the drugs, nobody could fix him. But we went in, found what was causing the inflammation, what his body was attacking, we removed it, he just got back from Greece.

He was eating as he pleased, he was traveling around, he’s I’ve never felt better, I’m eating foods I’ve not eaten in two decades. Because That’s 

Ruth Soukup: amazing. 

Josh Dech: So what 

Ruth Soukup: was causing the inflammation? 

Josh Dech: It’s interesting. So we break it down to a couple different things we typically see. So sometimes it’s typically a form of dysbiosis or imbalance of the gut bacteria.

We see things like clostridia overgrowth. We see a lot of parasites, like a shocking amount of parasites. We see fungal overgrowth. We see mold and mycotoxins. We see E. coli’s and other bacterial issues. But interesting enough for him, it all started, we talked about that wear and tear, like Pair of shoes with no socks started 20, 25 years ago when he got his gallbladder removed.

And so something was causing toxicity that junked up his liver, which led to either poor bile acid production or bio salts, whatever it was. Cause the gallbladder is really part and parcel, or it’s subject to what the liver is doing. So his liver. Junked up, which caused his gallbladder to go, which caused them to snip, remove it, rather than deal with the problem, which led to this progressive wear and tear.

If you take someone off the assembly line at Ford motor company, eventually when things get to the end, they’re not going to be as they should. And the longer you do this, the worst things tend to get. Now, the other parts of the assembly line have to work harder or try to compensate. Those workers get tired.

They wear and tear, they injure themselves trying to keep up. And now you have a completely junked up dysfunctional, what could be a vehicle at the back end. These are really how diseases develop. And so his started with the gallbladder, but I have an example of fella, 21 years old. Perfectly healthy.

Perfectly healthy. And within two months starting a new job, he went in, just coincidental, started this new job. Two months in, he got irritable bowel syndrome, IBS. Six months after that, he developed blood in his stool, went to the doctor, and now he’s diagnosed with IBD, ulcerative colitis, proctitis, so the lower rectum.

His doctor said, it’s, I kid you not, Jewish people tend to get this disease more than other people. You’re Jewish, your family’s Jewish, and this is why you salamine pills. No! I kid you not. And so here’s what happened. Didn’t take long to figure out his new job. He started an HVAC. He’s in ventilation.

He’s working in new homes and old homes and rentals. I said, did you wear your PPE? What’s PPE? That tells me everything I need to know. It’s personal protective equipment. Didn’t wear his masks. Based on his symptoms, based on his presentation, the rapid onset, his history. And starting this new job, I’m like, you probably have a mold infection.

And so he said, why don’t we test for it? I want to be sure. Got a urine test. Lo and behold, came back for super high levels of okra toxin A or OTA, a very common mold infection. Pulled it out of his system. Seven weeks later, symptoms are completely gone. Now he was 12 or 16 weeks when we finally discharged him.

I was just in. I think just that late last year, earlier this year, and no drugs, no meds went back for scans and scopes and colonoscopies, and there’s no more disease. And guess what? He’s still Jewish. That 

Ruth Soukup: didn’t change. 

Josh Dech: Genetics are still there. Here’s the thing. Genetics can be exploited. If you have a weak link in a chain and you pull that chain, it breaks at the weak link.

If you have a genetic predisposition to expressing inflammation through this pathway, You can get 10 people in a room. One gets, they all get exposed to mold. One gets Parkinson’s, one gets asthma, one gets arthritis, one gets Crohn’s, one gets colitis, one gets IBS, one gets nothing. Everyone can experience it differently.

Right. You just had the genetic predisposition to being infected in this area. 

Ruth Soukup: And that’s 

Josh Dech: all it is. And this is why I say it can be reversed. It’s never random. We’re just looking in the wrong places. 

Ruth Soukup: Yeah. So how do you do this? Can you do blood tests? I mean, mold test? What what’s your process?

This is like literally fascinating. You’re like a body detective. 

Josh Dech: Kind of. How much time have we got? 

Ruth Soukup: A few more minutes. 

Josh Dech: Okay, I’ll try to make it quick. Luckily, I booked the whole hour. I wasn’t sure if we needed it. So I’ll make it quick. The long and short is we have to look through symptomatology. There is testing, but people spend several thousands, if not tens of thousands, kind of spraying and praying, going and getting urine tests and blood tests and hair tests and toxin tests and viral testing.

They go, you got Epstein Barr. We all have Epstein Barr, but your body is so compromised, it can’t keep it in check. So what we have to do, it’s through the art of symptomatology. And some people go symptoms. Symptomatology is a language. We have to learn how to speak. And if you integrate yourself in one language for long enough, like I went to Mexico in my early twenties, after a week I was like, conversational basic, just getting around, getting directions.

You can pick it up when you’re immersed. We’ve seen hundreds of cases of Crohn’s and Colitis, so we see a lot of the same symptoms. Your digestive system speaks to you. But it only has about 14 words in his vocabulary. Constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloat, pain, cramping, blood, mucus, increase, decrease, appetite, nausea, vomiting.

These are the words it knows how to speak. But you and I, Ruth, we can’t have a very meaningful conversation with just 14 words. We get very lost very quickly. 

Ruth Soukup: So 

Josh Dech: your body as a whole, Your blood work, your symptoms, your skin, your moods, your hormones. There’s about 13, 000 different symptoms or words in its vocabulary we can look at.

Literally 30 quadrillion combinations of them all that we can look at. And so the more fluid we get with the language of the body, you can have a basic Get around, get what you need, please and thank you with 100 to 500 words in most languages. So even learning basics of symptoms, how your body is speaking to you outside of just your gut, it’s 14 words, this can tell us what’s going on.

For example, anemia, SIBO conditions, hair loss libido issues. Look at psoriasis, eczema, thyroid problems. These can all be very indicative. Dry hands, dry feet of say parasites, where someone who might have acne and joint pain and brain fog, or get electrocuted like on cars and doorknobs might be more indicative of Candida or mold fungus.

Someone who maybe has Tourette’s, tics, seizures, maybe they eat. bone broth or collagen and calcium supplements and have bloody stool could be clostridium because it actually bursts the bacteria when you get these spores everywhere which ramps the immune system causing bleeding. We have to learn to look into the symptoms.

What else outside of just your gut and it’s like gas blow pain are we seeing? So really diverticulitis, gastritis, Crohn’s, colitis, IBS, all these things look the same because there’s only 14 words it can say. So we have to learn symptomatology. Once we can do that, it gets almost, I hate to say it, because a lot of people, I get the most opposition from people with the disease or institutions who are supposed to help people with the disease when we bring these up.

It is remarkably easy to fix in the right circumstances. And I don’t mean that to downplay someone’s two decades of suffering. We’ve seen it all. We’ve had people with a lifetime of it. We’ve had two year olds with bloody bowels. It always comes back to a lot of the same stuff. We just have to learn how to read it.

Ruth Soukup: Wow. That’s really incredible. Like insanely incredible. And I, we’re out of time, but I’m sure so many people who are listening to this are going to want to know, where can they find you? How do you find out more? Like, where do you get more information about what you’re doing? Because this is this is truly something that our world needs it so bad.

Like why are we stuck in these paradigms of just pop a pill? And it just, it makes me crazy. I know it really is. I mean, you can, it’s easy to follow the money trail and I hate it. I hate it because there’s a better way. There’s a better way to live there. You don’t have to suffer.

And so how can Josh, how can people find you? 

Josh Dech: Yeah first of all, I’m voting Ruth for president. Easiest way to find me. We’ve got a podcast called ReversABLE. We’ve had some really amazing world renowned guests on there. It’s all about the gut, how it interacts with our world. I recently started a second podcast just on Crohn’s colitis based on the lectures and teaching and trainings I give to my Facebook group.

We do have a free Facebook. We have all kinds of information you can access. All that can be found at gutsolution.ca.